What the Trucker Knows: A Checkup on the Card-Check Law

As Capitol Hill takes on union rights at the behest of corporate lobbyists, Esquire.com's political columnist continues to tell the stories of our time from the ground-up — this week with a workers-rights organizer whose company followed him, filmed him, emasculated him, and left him the victim of picket-line brutality in a hospital for several weeks. This is what we're legalizing?

That's one of the oldest Teamster jokes — one of many I compiled years ago during the course of a lengthy investigation into union corruption and thuggery in Hollywood. So you don't have to convince me that America's business leaders have some legitimate reasons (globalization, competition, and, yes, lots of union corruption and thuggery) for further crushing the "union movement." This time it's in the form of a massive campaign to kill the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), popularly known as the "card check" law.

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But what remains odd is that business corruption and thuggery never bring out the same passion for crushing the "business movement." Especially now, when the financial sector is taking unions down — and, hell, the Great American Middle Class — down with it, because Tim Geithner can tinker with our banking system 'til Judgment Day and the working man will still never be able to pay a mortgage on "Do you want fries with that?"

Consider, then, the story of one union member with whom I spoke recently: Kenneth Tucker, a 41-year-old truck driver from Baltimore with a wife and three kids. He was working for a company called Giant Foods until March 2006, when it downsized his ass by spinning off its truckers to a Nashville company called Quickway Transportation. The way he tells it, Tucker's story is a tragic one, sure. But more than anything it's emblematic of how backwards our legislative priorities have become: We're taking trucks away from truck drivers.

KEN TUCKER: They started off paying us a flat salary rate — about $1,000 a week, same as we made at Giant Foods. Then they took that away and started paying us by stops and miles, which isn't suitable for this area because of the traffic and congestion. After six weeks, I was down to $700 a week. To make it up, you had to work seven days a week. You go from being a family man to never seeing your kids.

ESQUIRE:So you organized a union.

KT: Me and a guy by the name of Angelo Jackson. We went to our old union rep at Teamsters Local 639.

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ESQ:So Giant Foods was unionized?

KT: Yeah. It was owned by Izzy Cohen until '01. Izzy, he loved the truck drivers and he took care of us, because he believed the truck drivers were responsible for getting the produce to the store in a safe manner, which helped them get a profit. Izzy was for the union. We didn't have any problems under Izzy.

ESQ:What happened to Izzy?

KT: He died in '01. Then it was owned by a company from the Dutch Netherlands named Royal Ahold.

ESQ: So you tried to form a union. What did Quickway do?

KT: They started telling the drivers how to vote and not to vote, putting anti-union materials in our checks, telling drivers that the union just wants to cheat you out of your money. Then, when they knew who was doing the organizing — myself and Angelo Jackson — they started following us and filming us. They actually fired Angelo. They said he was stealing time. But we were stops and miles, so how can you be stealing time?

ESQ: Then what?

KT: Then we had an election, and we won by a margin of three-to-one. Then we started negotiations.

ESQ: I take it that didn't go so well.

KT: They never wanted to do an hourly wage, and they never wanted to pay you by stops and miles in a way that it came out to a set wage. So the pay would vary. You couldn't count on what you were going to get at the end of the week. And the benefits weren't in place — not good ones. We tried mediation sessions through the National Labor Relations Board. We never got very far. Their last and final offer wasn't even half a cent — it was a third of a cent more than what they offered before.

ESQ: So you went on strike. How did that go?

KT: I was involved in an incident when a driver struck me — a tractor trailer on the picket line. I was in the hospital for several weeks. We had several confrontations on the picket line with management. One was actually caught on tape: a guy who stopped his car on the picket line and approached me and got centimeters from my face, wanting to argue. There was another incident when several of what we call "scabs" drove through the picket line, almost hitting people.

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ESQ: How long did the strike last? How did it end?

KT: We were on the picket line for seven-and-a-half weeks. After that, we concluded that we wanted to come back to work — and the company shut us out. We were asking for unconditional return to work. We were going to accept their pay still pending negotiation.

ESQ: And eventually, you ended up filing charges, right? What happened there?

KT: We went to the NLRB to file charges on the company for a whole lot of things. The big thing was the unfair labor practices such as following and videotaping. Altogether, about fourteen charges were filed. I think eleven of them they were found guilty on. Now we're in a settlement stage that is still going on. It's one of those things where they make it just keep going on and on. They were supposed to reinstate Angelo. To this day he hasn't been reinstated. The NLRB said they had to give us back pay. I'm still waiting.

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ESQ: So how much did all this cost you, personally?

KT: I lost my truck, a Ford Exposition; it was repossessed. I had to take my kids out of Catholic school. You gotta excuse me, just talking about it is rough — two-and-a-half years later, I'm still playing catch up. You feel less of a man. You let your family down.

ESQ: Can you put a dollar figure on it?

KT: Well over $60,000.

ESQ: But I don't get how the card-check law will help you. You were able to form a union, right? You won your NLRB case.

KT: But it's going on two-and-a-half years. It would make a union stronger, and that would give you a better outcome. And if the company's not going to give you a contract, the arbitrator would come in and give you a contract.

ESQ: So, what about the argument that unions make it hard for companies to compete? That's what they say about the auto unions, right? And strong businesses mean lots of jobs.

KT: I just don't agree with that. The year before we were laid off, Royal Ahold's profit was 165 million dollars. They gave us a memorabilia milk bottle thanking the employees for the profit — and the next year, they laid off 7,000 people. They closed the ice-cream plant, the beverage plant, the bakery plant, the frozen-food warehouse, all so they can make $300 million instead of $165 million.

You can read the NLRB's decision here. Basically, the judge says that Quickway broke the law by spying, lying, harassing, firing, transferring work to "owner-operators"/scabs, and the like. You can find hundreds more decisions just like that one right here. But that doesn't put the $60,000 back in Tucker's pocket. (Although that money must have come in handy during the financial crisis that hit Royal Ahold after fraud charges led to the resignation of its CEO and a $1.1 billion in settlements.)

It all reminds me of a very long conversation I had with a New Jersey dairy owner last year. He was so enraged at the union "thugs" who organized his workers that he sold the business. He insisted that he paid them well and treated them well. I said, yeah, but what if you died or sold the business to some royal a-hole? What would happen to them then? He said that America is supposed to be about individuals, and that he was a good individual, and that it wasn't fair.

Well, I sympathize. But that's what they call noblesse oblige. Didn't we come to this country to get away from that?

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Click here to e-mail John H. Richardson about his weekly political column at Esquire.com.